ARISTOTLE(384 - 322 BCE)

In The School of Athens, the fresco by
Raphael on the home page of this web site, Plato and Aristotle stand side by
side. Plato points to the heavens, to the ideal world of the Forms. Aristotle
is shown with his hand open toward the earth. The painting shows how passionate
Renaissance intellectuals were about the views and achievements of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. It also accurately portrays the difference between Plato
and Aristotle. It's a difference that shows up in their approaches to the arts.

The difference should not be exagerated. Both Plato and Artistotle believed
in unchanging rational essences, or Forms, which shape everything we know. Both
of them believed that nothing can be understood without grasping its form. (The
word "information" is derived from their philosophies; literally, it means taking
the form of something into one's mind, and letting that form shape the mind.)
Aristotle differed with Plato over what he called "the separation of the forms."
Plato insisted that the Forms were the true reality, and that the world of appearances
copies them. Aristotle held that Forms are never separated from things in this
way.The one exception to this is the "unmoved Mover", which is pure
Form. It is the goal toward which all things strive. For present purposes we
can safely ignore it. Everything we are acquainted with is made of matter which
is formed in some way or other. There is no form without content (or matter),
and no matter without form. The essential form of anything defines what it is,
and provides the driving force for that thing's existence and development. Everything
strives to "grow into" its form, and the form defines what the thing can potentially
become. So, for example, an acorn has the Form of an oak tree. That it has that
form is not obvious from looking at it; but under the right circumstances, an
oak tree is what it will become.

Aristotle took time and change more seriously than did Plato. Not surprisingly,
he was also somewhat more friendly to the passions than was Plato; though he,
too, thought that the moral virtues were various habits of rational control
over the passions.

Like Plato, Aristotle thought that art involved imitation (mimesis),
though on this point as on many others he was flexible and allowed for exceptions.
He also thought harder than Plato about what art imitated. For example,
he says that Tragedy is an imitation "not of persons but of action and
life, of happiness and misery" (Poetics 1451b). Thus he leans toward
the "art as imitation of the ideal" theory that Plato might have developed,
but never did.

These themes are developed in connection with the arts in Aristotle's Poetics.
Rather than shying away from Greek drama, as Plato did, because of the way that
it arouses the passions, Aristotle embraced this characteristic. One famous
element of his aesthetics is his theory of the katharsis, or purging
of the emotions "through pity and fear", that is accomplished by a tragedy.While
he does not develop this theory at any length (it occurs in only a few lines
of the Poetics), it has had a lot of influence. Aristotle does seem to
have believed that this emotional katharsis was a good thing, and thus
he seems to have embraced an aspect of the arts that Plato rejected.

The Unities

The Poetics is largely devoted to drama, in particular to tragedy. Aristotle
provides both a history of the development of poetry and drama, and a critical
framework for evaluating tragic drama. The Poetics is the first systematic
essay in literary theory, full of insight, and showing a high degree of flexibility
in the application of its general rules. Like many of Aristotle's other attempts
to systematize knowledge about an area, this framework has had a strong influence
up to the present day, and was particularly influential during the Renaisance
and the early modern European periods. Aristotle stresses the need for a work
to be unified. The plot should be unified, portraying, in effect, one extended
action which is set up, develops, and comes to a climactic conclusion. (Of course
it should not develop in a tediously predictable fashion, but should have twists,
turns and surprises which will keep the viewers' interest and arouse the desired
emotions of pity and fear.) The character of the protagonists should be consistent,
and the action should be the sort of action those characters would produce under
those circumstances. The time of the action should also be unified, so that
the plot can be held in memory as one action. Aristotle thought this would usually
imply that the action would occur within one day. These "Unities"
of action, character, and time were developed and added to by Renaissance writers
to produce a code of "decorum" for dramatic productions, and failure
to observe the "Unities" was often taken to mean failure of a work.
Of course this brought a rebellion against Aristotle, who was not in fact responsible
for the excesses of this code, and no doubt had no intention of producing a
set of rules for dramatists in the first place. His critical standards no longer
rule the evaluation of plays and novels, let alone other works. But the Poetics
remains an impressive accomplishment, and many of its insights continue to ring
true. It still seems a good general rule that a plot should be unified; that
in a drama character should be revealed by action; that surprising turns are
a great help to a plot, as long as they are not implausible; that one should
not try to cover too great a length of actual time within the time of the play.
The idea of catharsis is a potent one; and so is the idea that art portrays
the universal, "not a thing that has been, but a kind of thing that might
be."

Here is Aristotle's definition of tragedy:

A traagedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also,
as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories,
each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not
a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish
its catharsis of such emotions. (Poetics 1449b.24)

Aristotle distinguished six elements of a tragic drama: Plot, Character, Diction,
Thought, Spectacle and Melody. Diction and Melody are the style of the text
or lyrics, and the music to which some of them are set (Greek tragedy was like
opera in that parts of it, though not usually the principal lines of the actors,
were sung). "Spectacle" refers to staging, lighting, sets, costumes,
and the like. Thought refers to the indications, given primarily through words
but also through other means, of what the characters are thinking. That leaves
the two elements to which Artistotle paid most attention, Plot and Character.
Of these two, Aristotle thought that the Plot comes first. "In a play,
they do not act in order to portray the characters; they include the characters
for the sake of the action" (Poetics 1450a.20). That does not mean he would
have approved of those modern "action films" in which it hardly matters
who does the shooting or the fast driving. For Aristotle, action must be consistent
with character, and reveal character.